A secure key management framework for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Abstract

A Wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of numerous sensor nodes with both insecurely limited hardware and restricted communication capabilities. Thus WSNs suffer from some inherent weaknesses. Key management is an interesting subject in WSNs because it is the fundamental element for all security operations. A few key management models for heterogeneous sensor networks have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new key management scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography and signcryption method for hierarchical heterogeneous WSNs. Our scheme as a secure infrastructure has superior sensor node mobility and network scalability. Furthermore, we propose both a periodic authentication and a new registration mechanism in our scheme due to prevention of sensor node compromising. Also, the proposed scheme does not increase the number of keys in sensor nodes and has a reasonable communication and computation overhead compared with the other schemes. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.